After changing my underwear for the third time on Saturday when Washington State and Kyle Weaver had themselves an epic double-overtime choke job against Vanderbilt, I came to the determination that there was no way the UCLA-Indiana game would be at all exciting, if only just to karmatically balance out the earlier games.
As with most things in this year’s tournament (my bracket currently stands at around 56 percent correct, which is so beyond terrible that I will offer no other explanation other than I had BYU in the Elite Eight), I was wrong.
Instead of letting me go quietly into that good night with an easy victory, UCLA decided to make it interesting. For 35 minutes, the Bruins were dominant on defense, and efficient enough on offense to basically put the game out of reach for Indiana.
I say “basically” because all of a sudden it was a tie game and I still have no idea how it happened.
UCLA and Indiana played a first half that was basically the antithesis of the Long Beach State-Tennessee game (yeah, I picked Long Beach State ““ never pick a game because a sibling went there ““ thanks Pat). The Bruins held the Hoosiers to 13 first-half points, and I was having the typical “will Indiana break 30 in this game” conversations.
I’ll be honest. It was St. Patty’s Day, so I wasn’t exactly in a state of mind to really comprehend what was going on late in the second half. My thought process went something like “Game over … game not over? David sad,” over the last four minutes of the game, so you’re going to have to go without my usual enlightened analysis of the comeback.
Did UCLA start playing lazy defense? Did Indiana just start making shots? Did Alfred Aboya really just do that?
These are questions to which I do not know the answers (although Aboya really did do that. Seriously, it’s like Baxter eating a wheel of cheese; I’m not even mad when he fouls someone anymore, I’m curiously impressed by his inability to move quickly without hurting someone). What I do know is that the first half was a defensive effort reminiscent of last year’s UCLA team and that certainly bodes well. You know when the yokels on ESPN start calling our games ugly that the Bruins are doing something right.
Indiana is a decent team in a really overrated conference, and for 35 minutes, the Bruins treated them like the Hoosiers were a fantastic team of fourth and fifth graders. I think there was a stretch of about 10 minutes where Indiana did not score a field goal. For those of you scoring at home, that’s impressive.
Those five minutes at the end? I’m just going to figure the players were trying to figure out what they were going to do for their St. Patrick’s Day festivities that night (what with all the Irishmen on the team). So we’ll pretend it never happened (though those of you who had nightmarish Nam-like flashbacks of a reversed Gonzaga game from last year were not alone).
So the Bruins head to the Steve-16 next Thursday. They will face off against a Pittsburgh team led by Aaron Gray, who is a maxed-out Michael Fey.
So UCLA will be in the Elite Eight on Saturday, and that will be nice.
E-mail Woods at dwoods@media.ucla.edu if you think it would be cool if he would stop jinxing the team by calling victories before they actually happen.